Chronicles of Oklahoma

PIONEER BEGINNINGS AT EMMANUEL, SHAWNEE
By the Reverend Franklin C. Smith*
After a lapse of a half-century it is perhaps unusual that my
recollections of Shawnee, the town, the church and the people,
should be so comparatively clear. I attribute this to the fact that
it was my first church wherein I labored with progress and set-backs,
made my mistakes and achieved modest successes, and so it left its
imprint upon my mind. Facts and figures, of course, are furnished
by the old records of parish and diocese in my library.
I can justly make the claim of being an Oklahoma pioneer and
certainly one of the pioneer clergy of what is now the Diocese of
Oklahoma. There are living today but three cler -      who were of
the early days: the Reverend A. C. Fliedner, retired, who was for
a brief term in the District before 1897; the Reverend F. R. Jones,
retired, who was a Candidate for Holy Orders and worked in the
District as such from 1895 to 1897 and returned to the District
after his ordination in 1900; and myself, who came to the district
in 1896 and remained untiu 1901. As regards my claim to be an
Oklahoma pioneer, the Territory itself was but seven years old when
I came to it, the Cherokee Outlet country but three years old, and
the Kiowa-Comanche opening was in my time in 1901. Shawnee
itself had attained the ripe age of five years when I first visited it.
It is not of the dramatic event of the opening and the "Run'' that
I am going to speak, known as the beginnings of Oklahoma Terri-
tory history, save to say that if you had stood on the southern border
of Kansas on the morning of April 22, 1889, you would have wit-
nessed one of the strangest spectacles in all the story of the settle-
ment of the great West. I am       referring to the "Big Run,'" a
gigantic horse race for homes. New England had its birth in the
psalms of the Pilgrim Fathers; Kansas in the border warfare of
Free Soiler; Utah in Brigham Young's "This is the place"; Texas
in the smoke and flame of the Alamo. Oklahoma, one of the young-
est of the commonwealths, had its birth in the crack of a cavalry-
man's carbine on that fateful morning.
I came to the Territory in May, 1896, as a Candidate for Holy
Orders and Bishop Brooke sent me to El Reno in charge of Christ
Church. I held my first service in Shawnee sometime in 1896 and
was appointed in charge in 1897. I 7am founder of Emmanuel,
Shawnee. We came into its residence in the summer of 1898.
*The Reverend Franklin C. Smith is Canon Residentiary, St. Mark's Cathedral,
Grand Rapids, Michigan. His interesting history of early days in Shawnee published
in this number of The Chronicles was delivered as an address at the Semi-Centennial
celebration of Emmanuel Church (Episcopal), Shawnee, Oklahoma.-Ed.

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